When Frank Stäbler enters his grandpa’s old chicken coop, he sometimes itches. The chicken coop has now become a training facility, and Stäbler would like to find a sparring partner on the ring floor and work on it according to all the rules of art. But at the moment he can only throw the lifeless wrestling dolls onto the mats. In the long run, this may be something for dummy fetishists, but not for Stäbler, the three-time world champion in Greco-Roman style. “The coronavirus is a disaster for full-contact sports like wrestling,” he says. “We will probably be the last to return to normal.”
The 30-year-old does not want to complain too much. He’s better off with the converted chicken coop than almost any other German wrestler, for whom the doors to the training halls have largely been locked in the past weeks and months. Wrestling is Stäbler’s central purpose in life, and his biggest dream is to win a medal at the Tokyo Olympics next year. That is why he wishes that normal training operations can start again quickly.
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However, that is still a pious wish at the moment. While Bundesliga football is being played again and league operations in basketball, for example, should start in a few days, contact sports competitions such as wrestling, boxing, judo, karate or kickboxing are far away in Germany. The reason is obvious: the risk of infection with the coronavirus is particularly high in these sports.
In wrestling, for example, the athletes press their heads and bodies against each other for an average of around six minutes during a fight. When boxing, sweat splashes over many rounds; and the cling, in which the exhausted fighters fall around their necks and blow their breaths deeply out of their lungs into each other’s face, belongs to the sport.
Strictly speaking, from the perspective of infectious diseases, there should be no male-to-male or female-to-female training or tournaments until there is hope for salvation from the coronavirus pandemic. But that’s just a perspective. Wrestlers in Germany see it differently. They are angry with other sports and other countries that things are not going fast enough. For them, every day on which training cannot be optimal again is a lost day.
Even Stäbler can only do individual strength and fitness training at the moment, but not much more. “Wrestling isn’t just about strength,” he explains. It depends on the fine motor skills, the reflexes. To find the right handle quickly. “If you haven’t done that for months, it takes months to master it really well again.”
The problem for him and his sports comrades is that although no competitions are planned for the next few months, the United World Wrestling (UWW) is planning to host a world championship at the end of the year. “Then we shouldn’t lose much time,” says Stäbler.
Note: The story was originally published in tagesspiegel.de
